Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

This taste buds thing is really starting to annoy me. So little tastes good, including most of my healthy stuff. My green drinks don’t taste the same, but I’m still chugging it down anyway. My afternoon juices don’t taste the same, so I am giving Ethan more than me and trying to get at least some of it down. Breakfast, lunch, dinner: doesn’t really matter what I eat, it just tastes funny, and then leaves a funny taste in my mouth. I find myself chewing lots of gum, and eating way more sugar than I want. Today was a food day at work and I sampled a few things — cheese and crackers, spinach dip, chips — just to see if I could find something that made my taste buds happy. None of those worked. But the chocolate cake with peanut butter icing went down nicely. Why is that? Why couldn’t it be that cancer made sugar taste bad so your body would crave healthy stuff. Just another of life’s ironies, I suppose.

Tonight, Mom cooked dinner. I had one bite of roast beef; the texture alone turned me off (but not sure if that’s chemo related or due to all my reading and documentaries…). Oh, and this is certainly NOT a reflection of my mother’s cooking! She’s the best cook I know! I managed a few servings of mashed potatoes (with extra salt to tantalize my taste buds), and I’m holding off on the piece de resistance: Mom’s pumpkin pie. Hey, it’s got sugar; it’s gotta taste good! (For the record, candy doesn’t taste so good, even though it’s sugar… I think I’m just good with baked goods!)

Speaking of pumpkin, I found a yummy-looking recipe for pumpkin muffins. I think I’ll try it out this weekend, or maybe even tonight. If they are good, I will make them for work next week. We are having a “scary foods” food-day for Halloween. I figure I’ll just put up a sign “vegan muffins”; that will probably scare most! 🙂

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2 thoughts on “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”

Michele,
I can’t say I’ve ever seen it written anywhere, but I can tell you from experience, chemo makes things take funny. I have heard it described as a bitter taste, metallic taste, etc. I have seen quite a few people have many different issues with food while taking chemo. Keep trying, something will strike your fancy. Sometimes having a little something with a caloric value is better than nothing, so remember this is only for a short time. Keep your strength up!!

That was probably the hardest side effect to manage. Bland foods like scrambled eggs, rice pudding, cottage cheese became staples. Also for a time I wanted nothing but cold shrimp and fresh pineapple. Hope you can start enjoying your healthy eating again soon!